Rick Holmes column: Thoughts while mowing

Tuesday

Jul 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2007 at 4:07 PM

I hit the lawn just after the baseball game ended, determined to finish the job before the rain began. It had rained the night before, and the ground was too wet to mow in the morning. One thing led to another, and by late afternoon my weekend window of opportunity was closing.

By Rick Holmes

I hit the lawn just after the baseball game ended, determined to finish the job before the rain began. It had rained the night before, and the ground was too wet to mow in the morning. One thing led to another, and by late afternoon my weekend window of opportunity was closing.

I expected my neighbors, faced with similar circumstances, to be out in their yards with the same goal in mind, but the roar of my Lawnboy was the sole voice echoing down the cul-de-sac.

I realized then that weekends on my street have gotten quieter in recent years, as more neighbors switch to landscaping companies to care for their lawns.

Weekday mornings, as a corollary, have gotten noisier. The landscaping trucks start lumbering in around 7 a.m. They don't wait for the morning dew to dry off the grass before firing up their lawnmowers. They've got too many customers to tend to, and cannot wait for optimal conditions.

It didn't used to be this way. Not too many years ago, every family had a lawnmower and on a sunny weekend day, they more often than not roared in harmony. When did middle-class folks like us start outsourcing this quintessential suburban chore, and why?

Before I finished the side yard, my mind lit on several hypotheses:

My neighbors have higher standards than me when it comes to their lawns, especially those who bought their homes at inflated prices over the last few years. When you spend half a million bucks on a subdivision home, you want a nice yard to match - and, presumably, you can afford to buy one.

Instead of worry about the perfect lawn, I've come to appreciate the mottled look of my yard, as different kinds of ground cover - grass, crabgrass, dandelions, clover, moss - come to dominate different sections of lawn. It's an attitude born of necessity: I can't afford the time and money it takes to cultivate a lawn worthy of a country club fairway.
Professional landscapers are cheaper and more numerous than they used to be. I expect this has much to do with illegal immigration. Immigrants work hard, for low wages. Landscaping is a a skill that easily crosses borders, with little translating required. The start-up costs for a landscaping business are low, and you can deal in cash.
The landscapers are especially cheap compared to the salaries my neighbors are making. Like most young professionals, my neighbors have more money than time. When you're making $50 an hour and every minute away from your Blackberry makes you fall further behind, you can't afford to invest your time on minimum-wage tasks.
Today's kids don't do lawns. Back in the days of yore, my buddies and I knocked on the neighbors' doors and offered to mow their lawns for a few bucks. That doesn't seem to happen anymore. Whether today's teenagers are too ambitious for menial labor, too wealthy to sweat for cash, or just too lazy, I don't know. I can occasionally get my own children to help with the lawn, but they want to be paid, and they are already costing me more than I can afford.

If I sound excessively frugal, take it as a sign that the wages in the newspaper business haven't grown like those in the various tech sectors that employ my neighbors. Since I couldn't afford to buy the home I built 15 years ago at its current inflated value, I figure I can't afford to hire gardeners to tend the estate.

Besides, I like mowing the lawn. It gets me away from the phone and the e-mail and gives me a chance to spend time on the property I'm still making hefty mortgage payments on. And it also provides a few minutes of not-so-quiet time to think and wonder, among other topics, what my neighbors are doing with the extra hour they bought themselves by hiring out this pleasant task.

Rick Holmes is opinion editor for the MetroWest Daily News (Framingham, Mass.). He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.